Weekend Watchdog Wrap-Up

The biggest whiff goes to Face The Nation, which allowed Karl Rove to punditize at will, as if he was a mere observer of politics. Host Bob Schieffer failed to ask him about the week’s biggest bombshell, evidence that the Bush Administration forged a letter to falsely link Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. (Come of think out, none of the Sunday shows bothered to mention the latest Bush scandal.)

Over at Meet The Press, Tom Brokaw spent considerable time talking about the economy with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, but the notion that increased public investment is needed to create jobs and strengthen America’s competitiveness did not fall inside the accepted parameters of policy discussion.

(Though I should note that Tom Brokaw did dare utter the word “regulation” when asking about policy changes in response to the housing and credit crisis.)

Finally, on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace did actually ask McCain campaign manager Rick Davis about his role lobbying to help the German-owned DHL buy Airborne Express and control 8,000 Ohio jobs which are now about to be lost. So, a point to Fox for not ignoring the issue.

However, Wallace only asked the superficial political question: “Are you and Senator McCain going to do anything to try to prevent that?” Wallace did not get into the deeper policy question:

Is consistently bending over backwards to help multinational corporations (and in Davis’ case, getting paid hundreds of thousands in the process) serving the American economy?

Foreign investment, of course, is not a bad thing for America. But a system where the rules are constantly written for multinationals and never written for workers — partly because multinational corporations can afford spend millions on lobbyists — clearly is not building a healthy global economy.

Another idea rarely deemed acceptable in the parameters of Sunday show discourse.

A mass refusal by the public to watch Donald Trump on TV will deprive him of big ratings, which he routinely uses to create a false impression of widespread popularity.

About Bill Scher

Bill Scher is the Online Campaign Manager at Campaign for America's Future, and the executive editor of LiberalOasis.com. He is the author of Wait! Don't Move To Canada!: A Stay-and-Fight Strategy to Win Back America, a regular contributor to Bloggingheads.tv and host of the LiberalOasis Radio Show weekly podcast. He has opinion articles that have been published by the New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Omaha World-Herald, and has made appearances on CNN, MSNBC and NPR among other TV and radio outlets.